The Malcontents Read online

  ‘It’s a mistake to fancy one can foresee everything, Tom. We’ve got to do our best inside the situation. What they used to call the So Sein. That’s all we have to play with.’ The Bishop’s accent rang oddly round that table: but he wasn’t prepared to be out-faced and out-cultured by his host. In secret, the Bishop, who had his own modest pride, believed that he was a good deal the cleverer man. Then he said: ‘Now Stephen. Tell us how those pulsars are going on.’

  It sounded at the same time graceless and also very warm. It affected Stephen as both these things. On another occasion he would have been amused to hear his father’s techniques brought to a dead stop: it didn’t often happen. Thomas Freer was too evasive for most men. Curiously, however, the Bishop’s interruption, well meant as it was, produced an effect opposite to that intended. If Thomas Freer had known, he would have been more than ever satisfied. For the diversion made Stephen, not less tense and impatient, but much more. His father’s probing – the inaudible dialogue which only the two of them could hear, though Mark had caught some echoes – that chimed with his own thoughts. Now this kind man was distracting him away from them. It was still a long time until the dinner could be over. He had to force himself to produce a polite reply.

  ‘I don’t think we’re getting much further, sir.’

  Stephen, as the Bishop knew, was doing research in astrophysics. For the sake of lightening the party, the Bishop would have been prepared to show interest in any intellectual subject, but this one happened to be a favourite of his. Stephen wished he had never heard of it.

  The Bishop made cheerful noises about quasars and pulsars.

  ‘It’s wonderful how much we know, compared with twenty years ago.’

  Stephen made another effort, trying to liberate himself.

  ‘Sometimes I think it’s more wonderful, what we shall never know.’

  ‘That’s very interesting, Stephen, that really is. What exactly do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, if ever we thought nature was simple, now we know for sure it isn’t.’

  Almost against his will, or his concentration, Stephen began to talk more freely.

  ‘That is, if there are any universal laws for the cosmos, they must be very difficult. So difficult that it looks as though we may never know them–’

  ‘Do you mean,’ said the Bishop, sparkling, ‘that our minds are limited and the cosmos isn’t? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I shouldn’t put it quite that way.’ Stephen gave an involuntary smile. ‘But I don’t think the universe is going to look beautiful ever again. No nice beautiful simple generalizations like Einstein’s. It’s just a hideous tangle, and it’s becoming more tangled every time we look. And, if you like, you can say that our minds are too simple to cope.’

  The Bishop, ruddy face blushing deeper as he chortled, said: ‘Well, you know, that doesn’t come as altogether surprising to anyone in my profession. After all, what you’re saying about the cosmos, theologians have sometimes said about the mind of God.’

  The Bishop, indomitable, persevered, sure that he was bringing peace. He was so bright, so happy, that others were happy too. True, Thomas Freer wore a lugubrious expression, as though cosmology were not a suitable topic for a man of taste. But even he did not resist the Bishop’s spirits, the Bishop’s speculative joy – the hundred million stars in the galaxy! the billions of galaxies! the rim of the universe, to which the galaxies were rushing and rushing over!

  Stephen was as disciplined as anyone there. He had to keep up his share of the conversation. Mark, who was reading history and was nothing like as knowledgeable as the Bishop, could come in only when he began to ask about the chances of intelligent life. Kate Freer’s long-sighted eyes might be deceiving her about her left-hand neighbour, but she thought that he looked excitable and restless. She had an indulgent spot for that young man, so gentle as well as active, so affectionate to her. She didn’t know that he and her son, and Tess Boltwood too, were all reckoning on the Bishop going to bed early before his Sunday work: and then they would be released.

  The pudding was in front of them and their glasses of sauterne. The candlesticks were reflected clear in the rosewood. It seemed a comfortable dinner party, one of many in that house, just as Thomas Freer expected his dinner parties to be comfortable. The Bishop continued to preside, amicably, joyously, over his seminar.

  ‘There must be intelligent life elsewhere, I should be flabbergasted if there wasn’t. There must be,’ he said.

  Mark and Tess emphatically agreed. With them, that was an article of faith. And some day we should get in touch with it.

  ‘I’m not quite so certain of that,’ said Stephen.

  ‘But you don’t doubt that there must be life, do you now?’

  The Bishop was fond of them all, but it was Stephen he respected.

  ‘It’s beginning to look as though life may be a rarer chance than we ever thought.’

  Stephen, with automatic competence, out of the front of his head with his preoccupation pushed deeper down, went through the arguments he could have reeled off in his sleep. Conceivably, though not very probably, life might be one preposterous fluke. We might be alone in an infinite silence, a random plasma of matter and energy, numberless billions of suns, burning away, billions already burnt away, progressing without anything that one could call meaning or purpose, all a prodigy of mindless waste, in the direction of entropy and thermodynamic death.

  That didn’t quell the Bishop, who possessed a remarkable gift for reconciling any idea with any other. Multitudes of planets with intelligent life, scattered all through the universe – yes, he liked that idea, he liked any prospect of life. He was perfectly prepared to reconcile that idea with the Christian revelation. On the other hand, if Stephen’s scepticism turned out to be the answer, if human life was an extraordinary incident in the middle of infinity, well, that was marvellous too! Perhaps more marvellous! Meaning and purpose, said the Bishop warmly, those old theological proofs were nothing but naïve: but still, alone in the universe, that would be a special place for mankind, could anyone deny the exhilaration of that, could Stephen?

  Stephen could not resist breaking into his curiously youthful, ironic, pleasing smile.

  From the upright clock in the corner, the minutes ticked on. The party had not moved upstairs again. Thomas Freer remarked, in a formula all of them had heard before as one giving the final demonstration of his liberalism, that in this house there was no separation of the women after dinner. The Bishop behaved according to plan, or according to the plan of three people there. He announced, with amiable matter-of-fact humility, that it would soon be his bed-time.

  At that Stephen was, for the first time at the table, fully alert.

  ‘But you’ll leave Tess with us for a bit, will you, sir? We’ll get her safely home.’

  ‘Oh, we trust you, Stephen,’ said the Bishop’s wife, with a smile which exuded confidence in her own judgement. She had discovered, or thought she had, that there was tenderness between her daughter and Stephen. Of which Mrs Boltwood wholeheartedly approved, and had already had delectable daydreams planning the wedding.

  Outside, a clamour of bells had started. ‘Practising,’ said the Bishop. ‘Good chaps, giving their time on a Saturday night.’ He began to stir his short strong legs. ‘Well, well, Tom, it’s been a very fine dinner, I must say.’

  Thomas Freer said: ‘It’s always good to see you, Bert.’

  As the Bishop got up, he patted his daughter and, in homely fashion, told her not to be too late.

  3

  In the lane, when Tess and the young men had at last got free, the bells were clanging: not a single bell, but the whole peal, shuddering out with mathematical solemnity. The night had turned colder, the sky was now brilliant with stars behind the spire, but none of them spared a backward glance. They were half-running to reach the pub in time. During the evening, Stephen had managed to give Tess the first sketch of the news: now he was telling her more. Tess�
� mother was right in thinking that there was a tie between these two: but she didn’t know what the relation was, and she certainly didn’t know that Tess, in addition to loving Stephen, was committed in another sense, and was one of the seven whom they called the core.

  Their steps echoed in the empty street, past the school, the bank. Then the black windows of shops, one or two passers-by. The mouth of the market place, the lights of the Saracen’s Head. There was Neil St John, waiting for them in the corner, coming towards them on his heavy cyclist’s thighs.

  ‘What’s this in aid of?’

  Quickly Stephen said no more than he had said to Mark four hours before.

  ‘We can look after that,’ Neil’s squashed face was set, flushed up to the high temples, where the hair didn’t grow.

  ‘We’ve got to take it,’ said Stephen, voice cool and biting, ‘that someone’s on to us.’

  ‘Sod them. Sod the whole gang of them.’

  Neil was exuding anger, all through his compact powerful body. His capacity for passion was no surprise to the rest of them, but it still impressed them and made him formidable. It would have been hard for an outsider, looking on, to guess whether he or Stephen had more authority over this group, or which was likely to be it’s leader. What was certain was that the others took for granted this young man’s animal force, took his personality for granted and had ceased to wonder about him.

  Earlier in their acquaintanceship, which had begun about two years before, they had done so. He was actually the youngest of them, only twenty, and a student in sociology at the local university, the one Tess was attending. He came from a family much poorer than any of theirs, poorer even than the Bishop’s used to be, and from a slice of society that even the Bishop wouldn’t have known first-hand. His father was a docker, their home was in Bootle, how they had acquired that grand-sounding surname no one knew, and Neil himself cursed it away as though he had been an American black loaded with a slave-master’s name. His father and mother were both Irish Catholics, and that was another heritage which Neil cursed away.

  He hadn’t yet become an intimate friend of the other three, but he was one of their springs of action, and they trusted him. That was why he was the first person Stephen had asked for that night. In fact, it had been his initiative, more than anyone else’s, which had started their present plan: the plan which, as they sat round the table in the pub, once old-fashioned, now tarted up, fairy lights and noise and all, with a jukebox conveniently blanketing all they said, seemed now at risk.

  Mark, efficient, gentle with the barmaid, had bought pints of beer just on the call of time. They had no need to discuss the plan, which they all knew off by heart. Both as part of his field work and as part of his politics, Neil in the past year had been ‘casing the joint’ of the back streets in the town. Near his own lodgings, he had discovered a street of terraced houses let to West Indian families: in some the conditions were ‘all right by Irish standards’: in one section of three houses the blacks were being rack-rented as they might have been in a nineteenth-century slum. Those facts were not in dispute. All four had visited the rooms, and so had the other three members of the core. Two families to one room: a turnover of comings and goings which defeated the local authorities: evictions of some immigrants who didn’t know the laws nor whom to turn to.

  If the victims had been white, that would have been bad enough. But they weren’t white, and for all these young men and women, that brought them to a fighting-point. This Saturday night no one foresaw what was soon to happen: and when it did happen, some simplicities were forgotten. But there were real simplicities. Tess was concerned for sheer misery: Mark wanted people to be good: Neil was outraged by the helplessness of the poor: Stephen, who sometimes seemed the hardest and most sceptical, couldn’t tolerate the sight of suffering. But though they were affected each in a different fashion, they were together about race. To them race, or rather the wiping-away of race and its effects, was as near a faith as any of them had, or as most people ever had. So far it was simple. But the plan did not end there, but began. Neil had tracked down the sub landlord of those three houses. He too was a West Indian, with the name Finlayson. He had been persuaded to talk (it was here that the first scruples had entered and been argued away). The chain of property led from him – that was true in law, and, anyone could persuade himself, in fact – back to an agent: and beyond the agent to the ultimate owner of the whole street, who turned out to be an influential Tory MP, a member of the Shadow Cabinet, and one who was proved to have interests in South Africa.

  ‘That’ll blow the roof off the bastards,’ Neil had said.

  This could be made a master stroke against racialism. It had to be well timed. Such a chance wouldn’t come again. Anti-racialists in all universities, not only this one, would join in. This core had their contacts with others. So they had waited until all the ‘presentation’ was complete. They had plenty of advisers, public relations men, open politicians and secret ones: no one except themselves, though, had been told the whole truth: that was at the insistence of Stephen, who had the clearest mind among them. In precisely two weeks and three days from this Saturday, ‘the balloon’, to use Neil’s exhorting phrase, ‘would be ready to go up’. Now it was under attack. As they faced the news, they felt a cause endangered, faith denied, and anger, including moral anger: some of them felt also traces of guilty compunction, of secret knowledge driven underground, and perhaps of fear.

  When they had to leave the pub and walked back towards the street, opposite the cathedral, where Mark’s car was parked, they were still talking in low tones, although there was no one to hear.

  ‘We can’t stop now,’ said Mark, fervent gaze traversing them all, ‘that’s the one thing clear.’

  ‘I hope it’s clear to everyone,’ said Stephen.

  ‘It’d better be,’ Neil burst out, but he, as well as the others, waited for Stephen to go on. His temper was often below the surface, so were his patches of eloquence: and they had learned when they had to listen to him.

  ‘This may not be pretty,’ he said. ‘They’ve all (he meant the other three) got to be told. So that they can get out if that’s what they choose. Tomorrow night.’

  ‘If anyone gets out now’, said Neil, ‘then we’re finished with them.’

  ‘In certain circumstances,’ Stephen remarked, ‘they might feel that wasn’t such a deprivation as we think.’

  Mark gave a chuckle, spirits high in the excitement, but Tess intervened: ‘I don’t think anyone will, you know.’

  ‘They’ve had it bloody easy up to now.’ That was Neil, suddenly as deliberate as Stephen.

  ‘No, but Emma’s solid, isn’t she? And so is Bernard–’

  ‘Lance?’

  ‘We all know about him,’ said Tess. ‘But I think he has his pride.’

  She was speaking unassertively, but with responsibility. And she had some: for it was through her, young as she was, that the core had come together. Meeting Stephen through the cathedral functions, and Mark as Stephen’s friend, she had brought them in touch with Neil and the others at the university: as he learned about the local plans, Stephen had decided that here, on his vacations from Cambridge, was the place to act. But Tess was speaking not only with responsibility, but with a kind of modest vanity. In most things, intellectual and otherwise, she deferred to Stephen, and often to Mark: but about people she had a sense, which would some day turn into a maternal certainty, that her judgement was better than theirs, not least when it came to themselves.

  The cathedral bells were silent now: so was the narrow street opposite, down which they walked, not often arguing but making contingency plans, walked to the end and back and kept retracing their steps while the clock chimed eleven, then the quarter and the half-hour. It was a street of Georgian houses, once elegant, such as might have suited Thomas Freer’s taste, but all converted into lawyers’ offices, not even a caretaker living there on a Saturday night.

  How much did ‘the
y’ know? Who were ‘they’? Stephen reported that his father hadn’t been precise, and presumably didn’t know: the information could have come from a colleague who might very well have political connections. It wasn’t certain how much they knew, or what they intended.

  ‘But we always underestimate the other side,’ he said. ‘We mustn’t make that mistake this time.’

  What could the other side do? It depended on how good their intelligence was. ‘It can’t be all that good.’ Neil, despite outbursts in which he was abusing them and all they stood for (‘they’ll never give in until we get rid of them, and that goes for everyone you know’), reminding the others that they came from that provenance themselves, was being realistic. ‘Someone couldn’t keep his mouth shut all the time, that’s all.’

  That was what it looked like. One of them must have let a word slip, perhaps after some drink, perhaps a vague euphoric threat against an eminent person, perhaps cheering someone up at a black and white party. Yes, in the narrow street, shut in by the tall houses, they said it must have been something like that.

  ‘But that might be enough,’ said Stephen.

  It wouldn’t need much insight to anticipate, not all, but some of their own moves. And the enemy’s right course would be to get in first. That might not happen, but it had to be reckoned with. A counter-campaign, starting soon. What kind of campaign? Again it was a question of how good the intelligence was.

  Stephen said that he would press his father to make inquiries. Those might have to wait until Monday. Meanwhile, they ought to consider hurrying up their own moves: once they were in the open, they couldn’t be quite silenced, the important part of the job would have been achieved.